Recommended Reading From Herbalife

Perhaps you noticed that The New York Timesspilled a very great deal of ink on Bill Ackman’s crusade against Herbalife on Sunday. In short, sayeth the Grey Lady: Ackman spent $1 billion betting that Herbalife was a fraud and has spent the ensuing 15 months or so asking people in power to prove his hunch.

“Ackman’s unprecedented campaign to destroy Herbalife has now been exposed for what it is: a cynical, self-serving attempt to manipulate the market by buying his way into an investigation to cover his own reckless $1 billion bet,” the company said….

But in its own statement Monday, Pershing Square reiterated its belief that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme, saying the company has failed to respond to basic questions that the hedge fund and others have continued to raise….

“We look forward to Herbalife’s evidence that our accusations are ‘provably false,'” Pershing Square said in a statement.

Ackman’s firm, Pershing Square Capital Management LP, hired OTG Research to evaluate Herbalife within China, Ackman said today during a presentation. Pershing found that Herbalife pays people illegally based on the number of recruits they amass. The company’s “hourly consulting pay” is key to showing that it violated laws, Pershing said, citing the OTG probe.

“It has gone to a point that I think is almost bordering on the insane,” Icahn said in response to a New York Times article on Monday about Ackman’s $1 billion bet that Herbalife will fail, entitled “After Big Bet, Hedge Fund Pulls the Levers of Power.”

Icahn, chairman of Icahn Enterprises L.P., said he had “never sold a share” of Herbalife.

The more frequently you monitor your portfolio, the more likely you are to observe a loss. This is likely to cause short-sighted decisions and could hurt your investment performance. If you are checking your portfolio more than once per quarter, you’re doing it too much.